Paul Miller

Africa is home to 20% of our planet’s land and 16% of its people, but none of the hyperscale public clouds run from data centers there — yet. Microsoft will offer Azure from data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg later this year, and Amazon recently announced plans to follow suit with an Amazon Web Services […]

There’s a recurring assumption in discussions about internet of things (IoT) platforms: The platform providers make their money by mining insights from data loaded into their platform. They sell those insights back to the customer who put the data there in the first place and will also sell them to anyone else who can pay. […]

Multicloud is a real and increasingly strategic customer choice rather than an accident of poor or nonexistent planning. We all know that; I’ve written about it before. Vendors of cloud tools and solutions are clearly aware of the multicloud trend as well and are moving to position themselves to best advantage. But there’s a problem: For too […]

Multicloud is a real and increasingly strategic customer choice rather than an accident of poor or nonexistent planning. We all know that; I’ve written about it before. Vendors of cloud tools and solutions are clearly aware of the multicloud trend as well and are moving to position themselves to best advantage. But there’s a problem: […]

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have become the cool must-haves for industrial technology vendor keynotes. I have lost count of the times we’ve watched someone on stage as they swoosh and swoop through jet engines, nuclear reactors, sunken wrecks, and the like. We ooh and we ah, and then we wonder if these […]

I have written before about the ways industrial and manufacturing firms are reinventing themselves to become more efficient and better able to win, serve, and retain customers. Over the past few months, I have been working with my US-based colleague, Michele Pelino, to analyze the industrial IoT software platforms that are so central to this […]

Software platforms to support the industrial internet of things (IoT) are becoming very credible options. But despite their appeal, I constantly hear from clients who are wary. These clients don’t doubt the technical capabilities of the platform, or the pricing strategy, or the industrial nous of their preferred vendor. But they are confused about who […]

I have been working on a strand of research for about a year, delving into the ways that the internet of things (IoT), machine learning, augmented reality, and digital transformation affect traditional industrial firms, their partners, suppliers, competitors, and customers. There’s an awful lot more to come, but one significant report — From Grease To […]

In volatile market conditions, conservative industrial giants must move faster to survive. And this digital transformation of traditional manufacturing firms cannot — must not — simply be about making existing industrial processes more efficient. They must recognise the opportunity to use digital as a way to create more sustainable and profitable customer relationships, continuously aligning […]

Public cloud platforms owed much of their early success to adoption by startups. With a bright idea, a web browser, a credit card, and no legacy baggage, the public cloud was an obvious place to build and grow a new business. For most enterprises, those early public clouds were a harder sell: If they were […]

(Photo Credit: justusbluemer Flickr via Compfight cc) Working closely with colleagues in North America and Asia, we just published the third of three related Forrester Waves on Hosted Private Cloud. Lauren Nelson kept all of us on track, and led work on the North American document. Charlie Dai took the lead for the Asia Pacific […]

(St. Rollox Chemical Works in Scotland by D.O. Hill, 1831. Image source: Wikipedia) The world of work is changing, with my colleague JP Gownder among those doing a great job tracking the shift. Despite — or perhaps because of — digitisation, robots, globalisation (and its opposite), and a less loyal workforce, competition for digital talent […]

The ever-dependable Barb Darrow at Fortune reported late last week that the OpenStack Innovation Center (OSIC) is to shut down. Cue wailing, gnashing of teeth, and portents of doom. But this may not be quite so bad as it appears, because the OpenStack Innovation Center isn’t nearly so critical to the open source cloud computing […]

(Public Domain image taken taken by US Astronaut Terry Virts, Jan. 30, 2015) Towards the end of last year, Forrester published four tightly connected Wave evaluations. These assessed the 18 most significant providers of public cloud platforms, looking globally, in Australia and New Zealand, in Europe, and in China. Now we’ve published a fifth document, […]

(A data centre in Hamina, Finland. Source: Google) Not long ago, European customers of the global public cloud vendors relied upon a single data centre ‘region’ for all their cloud computing needs. From Lisbon to Lviv, Kiruna to Kalamata, customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure sent everything to Ireland, and customers of […]

Public Domain image of Europe, derived from NASA World Wind data, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The hyperscale global clouds seem to crop up pretty much everywhere, these days. But we all know that customer requirements differ, from industry to industry, and from country to country. So… how do they cope, and how do we account […]

How often have you been told you can't use a mainstream public cloud provider? Quite often, probably, especially if you happen to work in a regulated industry like banking or healthcare. And what justifications are you given? The regulator "won't let you," no doubt? That's a good one. And "it's not secure" is often pretty […]

(Confusing messages. Image by Wikimedia Commons user 'Melburnian') Again and again, we hear examples of companies struggling as they try to realise the benefits of moving to cloud. They know what they want to achieve as a business, they know that cloud can help, but they cannot translate that understanding into the way they specify, […]

(source: Wikimedia Commons) Two weeks on, the result of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) continues to reverberate around the world. Forrester provided advice for clients needing to understand the business implications. Looking at the specific impact on public cloud deployments in Europe introduces a number of additional points. These are […]